Biking the South Fork of the American River Trail, hunting for meteorites in Coloma, and visiting Sutter's Mill and Placerville
With the slowly evolving quality of public transportation in the San Francisco Bay Area and beyond, a big question I always have is 'how far can you go without a car', either on a day trip or short weekend camping or maybe a little more, with only a bicycle
It is possible now to get to Folsom or Placerville from San Francisco without a car in four hours. This has been described a few years ago in the Bay Guardian and now there's updates.
You can take Amtrak with a bicycle from Oakland or Richmond BART to Sacramento in under 2 hours on the Capitol Corridor for 37 dollars. From there you have two choices close by in downtown Sacramento. You can take the Folsom 507 train to Folsom which has bike racks on the train (unlike Muni) or there is a commuter bus from Sacramento to Placerville on weekdays, or you can transfer at Folsom and use the Iron Point Connector to travel all the way to Pollock Pines which is at 4000 feet up in the Sierras. All of this is on El Dorado Transit You can also bike along the American River from Sacramento to Folsom. There is a bike trail the whole way
But what I did was take the train to Folsom and biked all the way up to Folsom Lake via Salmon Falls road to the Salmon Falls Bridge. The newly opened South Fork American River Trail which is the heart of gold panning country along that river and where gold was discovered in 1849. This is also the same area where parts of the Sutter's Mill meteorite exploded and landed
The South Fork of the American River get's the 1989 Marin Pine Mountain steel frame San Francisco bike messenger trash bike treatment. The same trash bike that was stolen and recovered in South of Market

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